A two-ways pipe is opened with sqlplus. There is only one connect, and one disconnect.

Let’s check the performance :

$ time ./script2
there is 14 lines in EMP
there is 4 lines in DEPT
real 0m0.23s
user 0m0.00s
sys 0m0.01s

About twice as fast! Note the “Connected” output may not exist in recent version of sqlplus in silent mode. If you have a script that generates hundreds of connections, or which create a connection every 5 seconds or so, think about it